


Tastes Like Home

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1930s, Comfort Food, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-08-08 01:10:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7737229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things taste better now, Steve had told anyone who asked. But there were some foods - fresh out of the oven, cooling on the rack - that needed ingredients this new century didn't have, a mother's deft hand or a boy's smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tastes Like Home

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure this came from somewhere on tumblr, and it's really just Steve musing on apple pie and soda bread.

Steve’s Ma made soda bread every winter. She used the coal stove because it was already lit, running hot while Steve sat on the floor beside it, wrapped in all the blankets they had, sniffling through an interminable cold. Their wobbly, scarred wooden table always ended up covered in flour and buttermilk, and the apartment smelled of baking soda and bread fresh out of the oven, so hot that steam rose from the edges when Sarah Rogers sliced them off for Steve to eat. The raisins were plump from the baking, bursting with flavors that food never had in mid-winter, warm and tasting of home.

(Sam went on a bread baking spree after they found Bucky, dug up old Irish Soda Bread recipes and tried to get the formula exactly right. And the color was right, the texture was good - but Steve’s hands weren’t numb with cold, and his nose wasn’t running. Sam’s house wasn’t shut up tight against any hint of a draft, didn’t have clouds of baking soda and steam hovering in the stale air. Steve ate the bread and smiled, and he never asked Sam for a recipe to take home.)

 

Mrs. Barnes made the best apple pie in Brooklyn, Bucky bragged, and Steve knew better than to disagree. She was a tall woman, Bucky’s mother, her hands callused from washing and feeding four children, her fingers deft around the old knife as she sliced hunks of chilled butter into the flour, spooned cold water into the bowl.

Steve would watch, transfixed, as she kneaded the watery mess into a crust, sliced apples into the pan quicker than Errol Flynn could handle a sword. She always made pie for Christmas, sent Bucky and Steve down to the market for apples and a few withered lemons “to bring out the taste.”

Steve and his Ma joined the Barneses every year for Christmas dinner. They wrapped the sausage and potatoes Mrs. Rogers made in towels to keep them warm before trudging through the ice and slush of the city’s streets. Bucky was always waiting at the window; he would throw the door open before Steve could knock, a rush of warm air and three girls squealing inside, Bucky’s bright grin and the smell of baking apples in the air.

(Bucky would make pie, sometimes, when he needed to ground himself on the days that didn’t go so well. Steve came back from a mission to a pie cooling on the counter, the scent of lemon juice and apples hanging in the air. Bucky couldn’t find the right apples, he said, and he’d added too much sugar to compensate, and had kneaded the crust for far too long. But he gave Steve a quiet smile as he handed Steve a fork, and Steve could taste Christmas in each sugary bite.)


End file.
